SPATIAL LINKAGE AND URBAN EXPANSION: AN URBAN AGGLOMERATION VIEW

Most existing global urban products with future projections were developed in urban and non-urban categories, which ignores the gradual change of urban development at the local scale. Using annual global urban extent data from 1985 to 2015, we forecasted global urban fractional changes under eight scenarios throughout 2100. The developed dataset can provide spatially explicit information on urban fractions at 1 km resolution, which helps support various urban studies (e.g., urban heat island).

A global land cover map with fine spatial resolution is important for climate and environmental studies, food security, or biodiversity conservation. In this study, we developed an improved global land cover map in 2015 with 30 m resolution (GLC-2015) by fusing the existing land cover products based on the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence on the Google Earth Engine platform. The GLC-2015 performed well, with an OA of 79.5 % (83.6 %) assessed with the global point-based (patch-based) samples.

A large-scale and high-resolution urban green space (UGS) product with 1 m of 31 major cities in China (UGS-1m) is generated based on a deep learning framework to provide basic UGS information for relevant UGS research, such as distribution, area, and UGS rate. Moreover, an urban green space dataset (UGSet) with a total of 4454 samples of 512 × 512 in size are also supplied as the benchmark to support model training and algorithm comparison.

Terrestrial biosphere models that simulate both leaf dynamics and canopy photosynthesis are required to understand vegetation–climate interactions. A time-stepping scheme is proposed to simulate leaf area index, phenology, and gross primary production via climate variables. The method performs well on simulating deciduous broadleaf forests across the eastern United States; it provides a simplified and improved version of the growing production day model for use in land surface modeling.